Hope you don't mind if I start at the bottom and work up? :) Growing kidney beans worth it? No, not IMO. Takes too much space for any worthwhile production. Plus they need to dry on the vine so all that space is locked up well into fall. Canning info? That is the Harvest Forum here for all the canning info you need. How-tos are readily available there. Seeds or plants? Seeds. They do much better than trying to transplant. Bush beans don't usually need any support. They are bushes and support themselves. But I guess you could use tomato cages if you needed to for some reason. I wouldn't. Pole beans don't require heavy duty support unless wind is a real problem. If so you can use clothesline or even wire but the string has the advantage of being disposable at season end. If you are concerned just double the string. But many other more effective types of support are available too. Check out the Beans and Peas forum here for more ideas and even some support pics. Hope this helps. Dave

I'm giving this a try for the first time myself this fall. So far I've just got the corn in (it's an heirloom sweet corn variety that's supposed to get tall), and am giving it a head start before I plant the beans, then once the beans are up hopefully I will have time to add squash (since I'm doing this in the fall I'll need my squash in by August if I want to get a harvest before winter). I do wonder about some of the recommendations people give on the internet. A lot of them seem to be from people who've never actually tried it themselves. I would say you shouldn't blindly follow any guidelines on the internet about spacing, timing, and numbers of plants, since that really depends on the varieties you choose and probably some other things. Choose a corn variety that gets tall (some sweet corn varieties do, I don't think you necessarily have to get a dent corn), and a bean variety that's not that tall. Don't plant them all at once, but plant the corn first, then the beans, then the squash. And if you fail, well, the great thing about gardening is there's always next year! I assume most of us here are white folk who haven't had the benefit of generations of gardening knowledge being handed down to us by our tribe on how to grow crops this way, so of course there's going to be a learning curve. I mean, here we are reading snippets of how to do this on the internet and trying to reproduce it in our suburban backyards with some packets of hybrid seeds from Wal-mart! I guess what I mean is if my 3S garden doesn't work out this year, I'll try again a few times before I give up, tweaking it as I go. As for modifying this method, I'm tempted to try out an African themed okra/cowpea/watermelon patch. Hmm, wonder if that would work.

I see this is an old thread, but it is a familiar problem for us here in the mid-South where we have extremely hot summers. I was watching the local news recently and a rice farmer was being interviewed and he mentioned that very warm night temps. inhibit fruiting and encourage growth. He said that it isn't so much the daytime high heat days that cause plants to not fruit, but night temps. of 70 F. and above, which is exactly what we have been experiencing here from early June until just a week and a half ago. Finally our pole beans our starting to show pod formation as our night temps have been in the 60's. We have half-runner and Scarlet runner and both have flowers, and have been flowering but not pods. We aren't from this area originally, and no one plants pole beans. No wonder. They plant bush types and plant them early which is the correct way to plant bush type beans - early, whereas pole beans like to be planted later. We like pole beans better as they don't rot like bush types and they taste better (Blue Lake). I am seriously thinking of relocating just because of this problem. We've been here over ten years and were able to pick pole beans three growing seasons. The very hot years we had to wait until very late summer or early fall before our beans, peppers and tomatoes started producing. Not fun gardening. On the other hand, the okra is very happy as well as the yellow squash.

The ideal month to plant green beans is in the last two weeks of February and into the first two weeks of March. The same goes for cucumbers. I see Contender bush beans listed and I totally agree with this choice. Of all that I have tried in the valley here over the years, I found these to give me the best results. While you can grow a fall crop I found the yeilds to be much lower. Also I found a lot of problems with slime ( maybe mold) on the beans when I picked them and the same goes for cucumbers. If you want a really cost competitive source of seeds, contact Jordan Seeds out of Minnesota. They have a catalog and are on line. Since I buy in larger amounts I am stunned at the prices. But hey, even if it is more seed than you want, you can give it away to someone or save the seeds until next year.